Eels Blogs

Clearly, I have a higher opinion of Matt Keating than 90 per cent of Eel’s supporters. While I like to consider myself a reasonable judge of footballers, I’m open to the suggestion that given I’ve been following him since his junior days and have always touted his ability, that maybe I’m looking at his game through rose-coloured glasses.

However, a few of us at the game remarked at half-time that nobody could possibly be critical of Keating after that performance. Yet, here we are again and EVERYTHING was Matt Keating’s fault.

So I just sat down and watched the game again. With a remote, a notepad and pen and an attempt to really take a critical eye to what he did. I think he was about Parramatta’s fifth best player on the night. As far as I’m concerned if you criticised MK after that performance, you are so biased in your judgement of him that you have lost the ability to watch any our football games with even the remotest of clear, rational thinking.

So let’s look at his performance from a pure statistical point of view. I’m using NRL Stats figures. Firstly, I’ll just point out that due to Robert’s injury he’s been forced to play 73 minutes on a wet track. Bronco’s hookers both played about the 40 minutes each. He probably went into the game expecting to play the first 50 minutes before McGuire replaced him, and as such wouldn’t have left anything in the tank after that first 40 minutes he contributed.

Defensively, he has made 44 tackles in those 73 minutes - second best for us, and not far below Hindmarsh on a tackle involvement basis. Yeh, yeh, I hear the critics saying. We know he can tackle. Except when Hindmarsh plays 80 minutes and racks up 51 tackles we all proclaim what a herculean performance. When Matt Keating contributes those kind of defensive efforts it’s brushed over as ‘so what?’. Indeed, it’s not even recognised that contributing those kinds of defensive performances is going to have an impact on a player’s attacking game. When a half has to make 30+ tackles we excuse him for a poor performance, because of the massive defensive workload. No such latitude is ever given to Matt Keating.

So let’s look at his attacking game. Worthwhile noting that soggy conditions don’t make ideal conditions for your hooker to scamper our of dummy half due to the slower play the balls, but Keating contributed two very strong runs in the first half for 25 metres. He had two digs in the second half when he went very close to scoring and another where he attempted to draw a penalty from the marker, and given how many we got awarded for us against not being square, it looked all over a penalty. Nothing earth-shattering, but solid quality running. He also put in a neat kick in the second half, that put the Brisbane fullback under a lot of pressure and had them pinned on their 1 metre line.

So all we’re left with is the dummy half service, which I keep reading is slow. Supposedly, Keating was at fault for the charge downs and all the poor backline options we took. The first thing to point out in this regard is that our forwards made excellent metres all night. Mannah, Allgood, Moimoi all made 10 metres per hit-up or over. If your forwards are effectively rolling forward, your hooker is doing his job. In particular, Keating worked superbly out of dummy half with Hindmarsh last night. Hindy made 124 metres from his 15 hitups, most of which were gains received not from simple hit-ups but from Keating engaging the marker to open up a little more space for Hindmarsh to break down field. Indeed, if you look at the play before we score in the first try, it’s an ideal example of what I’m taking about. Keating jumps out of dummy half, draws the marker and sends Hindmarsh deep into the ruck for almost a 15 metre gain. With Brisbane on the back foot and with better field position, Sandow has plenty of time to put in the kick that he then scores from - make no mistake that previous combination between Keating and Hindmarsh set the Eels up to apply the pressure that led to the try.

The suggestion that either of the charge-downs were related to Matt’s dummy half play is ludicrous. On the first Sandow has plenty of room to get the kick away, but he’s on the wrong foot and decides to throw it to Burt - also on the wrong foot and we end up with a poor clearance. I hate to tell people this but the dummy half, doesn’t put the halfback into position to kick the ball. On the second charge-down Sandow has a ton of room, he takes three steps forward but mis-times the kick which gets no air and flies straight into the opposition. Then I’ve read about all these poor dummy halve passes from Keating that put pressure on the backline. Every single one of those messy dummy half passes resulted from someone else being at dummy half. If you’re stupid enough to then suggest Keating should have gotten there to make the pass, take notice that the 120 ‘receives’ next to his name is the highest in the competition to date this round. Or in other words, no other hooker has worked harder to get into dummy half this week, and given the quality of the service provided when Matt wasn’t there, it’s just as well that was the case.

From those 120 receives, there was no more than two or three ocassions where I thought he was probably caught in too minds or we fell down at the dummy-half area, and from the worst of those we actually got six again. He and Sandow still clearly have to build a combination, but that’s to be expected at this stage of the season.

You don’t have to rate Keating. But for crying out loud, judge each player’s performance on its merit. And if you still think I’m full of crap feel free to go to the NRL Game Analyser and let me know the play (post the minute of the game) that you reckon backs up your point of view. I’m not interested in your “Keating is crap” bullshit, I think I’ve given plenty of evidence to show he had not just a solid game, but a good one, and I’m more than happy to take this down to a play-by-play analysis.